Free to Speak About Russia, but Now From a Safe Distance

And so the Russian revolutionary experiment--that started with Vladimir Lenin sneaking in from Finland--ends with Mikhael Khororkovsky flying out to Finland. Between these brackets, a feudal agrarian society entered the 20th century, developed socialized medicine, put a man into space. But once again, Russians who want to speak about legitimate government and human rights must do it from exile.

Free to Speak About Russia, but Now From a Safe Distance

Published: December 22, 2013

BERLIN — After a decade of incarceration that transformed him from Russia’s wealthiest man into its most famous political prisoner, Mikhail B. Khodorkovsky faced journalists in Berlin on Sunday following a head-spinning 36-hour journey to freedom.

Mr. Khodorkovsky recounted with a detached humor how, in the hours after a surprising clemency from his nemesis, President Vladimir V. Putin, he was awakened at 2 a.m. on Friday by prison guards at a penitentiary near the Finnish border and whisked away, first to St. Petersburg, then onto a special flight to Germany. “I was put on a plane, so to say, in the best traditions of the 1970s,” he said.

He said that he had written Mr. Putin to assure that he would not involve himself in everyday Russian politics, and insisted that he could not, for the moment, risk returning to Russian soil or even be sure about how much of his once-vast wealth he retained.

But there was nothing of the penitent about him.

During an hour spent with Russian-speaking journalists, Mr. Khodorkovsky, 50, exhibited the same calm assurance with which he once confronted Mr. Putin, vowing that he would work to help other political prisoners in Russia. Showing no trace of rancor or bombast, he also related some of the lessons he took from his years in prison, saying Russians themselves had to change.

“I think the Russian problem is not just the president as a person,” Mr. Khodorkovsky said. “The problem is that our citizens, by a large majority, don’t understand that their fate, they have to be responsible for it themselves. They are happy to delegate it, say, to Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, and then they will entrust it to somebody else.”

He added: “For such a big country as Russia, this is a dead end.”

This was not quite Dostoyevsky emerging from the penal colony, but Mr. Khodorkovsky was recounting something like a spiritual conversion.

After 10 years of being watched by cameras installed over his bed, his workplace, his table in the canteen, and at his every meeting with lawyers, he was free, and caught in a whirlwind of travel and revelation.

Arriving in Berlin — wearing a parka that officials hastily bought for him in the St. Petersburg airport to replace his prison-issued coat, he explained in an interview with the Moscow magazine The New Times — he was met by a former German foreign minister, ensconced in a luxury hotel, reunited with his parents and grown son, and met his 4-year-old granddaughter for the first time.

And he ended his public appearances on Sunday with a chaotic news conference at the museum to Checkpoint Charlie — the American outpost that symbolized the Cold War, America’s toehold in the wall that divided Berlin.

One of the architects of his freedom was Hans-Dietrich Genscher, 86, the wily former German foreign minister known here as the “old fox,” who used his own and special Moscow-Berlin channels to broker a clemency over the past two and a half years.

Negotiations started after Dmitri A. Medvedev, a close Putin ally who was head of state from 2008 to 2012 and is now prime minister, first talked of clemency when he was president, Mr. Khodorkovsky said. But there was always one hitch. “They told me, and repeated again and again, every time: I have to admit my guilt.”

Such an admission was unacceptable, Mr. Khodorkovsky said on Sunday, because it could have implicated every former employee of his oil company, Yukos, as part of a crime or a conspiracy. Colleagues who were still in Russia risked prosecution, he said, and those who had fled abroad could have faced extradition.

But after he learned that Mr. Genscher was offering clemency with no admission of guilt required, Mr. Khodorkovsky said, he wrote to Mr. Putin on Nov. 12, requesting clemency and attaching a letter that made clear he would not engage in politics, or try to recover shares of Yukos — most of whose holdings now form the Rosneft company, controlled by another Putin ally, Igor I. Sechin.

The formal reason Mr. Khodorkovsky cited for his request was his mother’s health and treatment in Germany, he said. That was why he came straight here.

For now, he made clear, Russia is off limits for him. After being convicted there twice — first for failing to pay taxes on his oil and then, curiously, for stealing the oil in the first place — he still faces a $500 million prosecution stemming from his first tax case. Only if the Supreme Court of Russia were to dismiss that investigation might he visit his native land.

Rela

“To take a risk to go to Russia and then, on formal grounds, not be able to leave — I just cannot do it,” he said.

Asked about his relations with Mr. Putin, his incarceration and his attitude now, Mr. Khodorkovsky painted himself the way phalanxes of lawyers and public relations teams engaged over the years have to keep his cause and name alive: as someone very far from the brash, young oligarch, one of a band of mostly young male Russians who amassed huge wealth in the Soviet collapse of the 1990s.

He suggested Mr. Putin had released him partly because of the coming Winter Olympics in Sochi and partly out of a broader concern for Russia’s image. Tracing the arc of his relations with the Russian president, Mr. Khodorkovsky began in February 2003, when he famously confronted Mr. Putin during a televised meeting in the Kremlin.

Mr. Khodorkovsky said he would never have given such a speech, criticizing corruption and other abuses, if presidential aides had not first assured him that it was fine, even desirable. Two weeks later, he noted, the first case against Yukos was launched. He was arrested in October 2003, on his private jet, at a Siberian airport.

“Of course the reaction for me was unexpected,” he said, though friends and others had warned him that he was crossing a line with the speech, and also by funding opposition parties, civic groups and society.

“But what I couldn’t let myself do, what some other person could, was reverse my words. I would not lie,” he said, adding that such stubbornness shows how ill-suited he would be to politics, at least in Russia.

On Sunday, he did, however, pledge to stay active for his Yukos colleague, Platon A. Lebedev, and political prisoners in Russia. And he signaled that, while he has no time for the day-to-day dogfight that is politics in his country today, he wants to see it become more democratic.

The biggest change in 10 years in Russia, he said, is that the number of people prepared to control their fate has grown “beyond a margin of error,” though it is still too small.

Asked about the biggest change in himself, he gave an impish shrug: “I grew 10 years older.”

More seriously, he said at another point, he realized that people, and not industrial possessions that made him a fortune, are the most important element in life.

He said his biggest loss in jail was a decade of “lost communication” with his family. And one of his biggest sadnesses was that 90 percent of his fellow inmates had no such fortune, and “nowhere to go” even if let out of jail.

Physically, Mr. Khodorkovsky, dressed in a dark blue suit and tie, looked healthy. Mentally, he said, he had always been an optimist. Besides, he added, Russian prisons today — while occasionally freezing, or having rotten food — are not in that physical respect the gulag of Soviet-era literature.

“I was trying to look at my situation as a challenge,” he said. “I was not torturing myself — yes, there were some days that were depressing, but basically I was not carrying them around inside me.”

“When I crossed the threshold of prison,” he added, “I understood this is for a long time. And then immediately quit smoking. If they are going to bury me, let them do it themselves, without my participation.”